I’ve  just spent nearly six hours in the kitchen making broccoli dishes to freeze. This is tiresome. Broccoli Lasagne. Broccoli Quiche. Broccoli & Spinach & Ricotta Canelloni. It’s not over. Tomorrow is another day, another broccoli day, another bean day, another salad and arugula day, and, very possibly, a cauliflower day. Yes, another day of toiling away in the kitchen, preserving our harvest, and doing my damnedest to convince myself that all this utterly slavish work will pay off when, after a long day of manual labor, I can pop some delectable, homegrown, organic, homemade dish into the oven and have a ready-made meal with no work involved. Well, you get what you pay for. I’m paying the price now. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t feel compelled to make my own pasta, but, you know, we’ve got something like 50 chickens, so, the eggs are there, and because we’re Costco-ers, we’ve got a thousand pounds of flour in the larder, so, I might as well, well,…. anyway.  This afternoon, I visited the freezer and extracted a container of frozen spinach that was labelled, in Andrew’s distinctive handwriting, “Salted Spinach Puree – 2009”. This seemed very dubious but, after defrosting it in the microwave and tasting it, believe it or not, it tasted exactly as one might expect salted spinach puree to taste like; nice, spinachy. (The purple leaf Basil puree, however, was not such a succes). The beets will be ready in no time, and the cucumbers and zucchini will begin to shout out at me, making demands that I may not be able to meet. This will be followed by Basil, crying out for Pesto-Festo!!! I’ll  go with the flow. I whine, but, at the end of the day, I know that it’s a tremendous privelage to have the space, the physical vigor and health, and the modest means to grow food for ourselves without relying on multinational supermarkets and knowing that the food we’ve produced is organic, wholesome and the fruit of our labor. We are blessed.